Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren declined to appear on a town hall for Fox News, and in her explanation for why, she pointed out three salient observations about our media landscape that are key to understanding what we are trying to do at Ad Fontes Media. Even if you do not politically align with Senator Warren, and even if you don’t mind Fox News so much, you likely recognize that at least certain shows on Fox (though not all) veer into (or live in!) very low-quality/highly-biased territory. First, she called Fox News a “hate-for-profit racket,” meaning that with some of their ...Read more

Quite a few people have asked if there are any news aggregators or apps that just serve up the best news sources from the top of the Media Bias Chart, and I'm happy to say that now there is a great one out there! We didn't make it, but we really like it. NeoCortix News is a free app and recently became available in the Apple App Store and Google Play. They describe it best on this section of their site, which explains how they choose sources based on the Media Bias Chart: "The purpose of Neocortix News is to ...Read more

For your convenience, here are website headlines from across the media landscape from this morning, the day after the full (redacted) Mueller Report was released. Most people don't visit 40 news sites about one story to compare bias and quality, but that's one of the things we do here, so we hope it helps you get a better sense of the universe of reporting. Speaking of universes, one of the most revealing things about this exercise is the disheartening realization that people who read all their news from sources having significant bias live in a completely different universe from those ...Read more

Ad Fontes Media is proud to announce its first extensive multi-analyst content ratings research project! Since the first Media Bias Chart was launched, people have been asking for more data and transparency about the news source ratings. Within the next two weeks, we are kicking off a project to provide exactly that. During this project, we will be performing ratings of nearly 2,000 individual articles and TV news shows, which will be conducted by 20 dedicated, trained analysts having political viewpoints from across the spectrum. Once the research project is completed, we will publish the results via an interactive version ...Read more

A common complaint of President Trump and others in the GOP is that a high percentage of media coverage of him is “negative.” The official GOP Twitter account often tweets about this, sometimes citing a statistic from a Harvard study stating that over 90% of media coverage of Trump is negative. This, the President and his allies complain, is evidence of bias. In this post I argue that “negative” coverage itself isn’t necessarily “biased,” and is often perfectly fair. However, it is often easy to confuse negativity and bias, and it is similarly easy for them to overlap within the ...Read more

BuzzFeed News just came out with a big story entitled "President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About the Moscow Project," which has been disputed by the Special Counsel's office. Whenever a single major news org reports a big, exclusive, consequential story, which is not shortly verified by other major outlets, it is best to reserve judgment on its veracity for about a week. Other news outlets (i.e., BuzzFeed’s competitors and colleagues) are doing the work to find out exactly what happened. This is the great thing about the media ecosystem—everything is instantly peer reviewed. This ...Read more

Are you interested in becoming an analyst for the Media Bias Chart Project? We are currently recruiting analysts for the next phase of the project, which will run for about 10 weeks in early 2019. Applications are due December 8, 2018, at 11:59 pm MST. We are looking for a diverse group of individuals with differing political views to be part of our team. The main qualifications we are looking for are 1) excellent reading comprehension skills 2) excellent analytical skills, and 3) in-depth knowledge of contemporary US political issues. Analysts will be paid as independent contractors, and will receive ...Read more

Day-after-election coverage is especially useful for differentiating news content on both the quality and bias metrics. This is because election stories are naturally full of concrete facts--who won, who lost, where, and by how much. Further, the facts by themselves are fairly easy for most people to interpret without having someone else analyze them and give you their take on what they mean. Winning is generally good, and flipping a seat is even better. Losing is generally bad, and having your seat flipped is worse. Winning by more than expected, or losing by less than expected, are also good--everyone can ...Read more

USA Today, which has an overall source rating on the Media Bias Chart of “Neutral, Fact-Reporting,” published an Op-Ed written by President Trump yesterday that was widely panned by other news sources and on social media. The op-ed itself was analyzed and fact-checked by an article in the Washington Post the same day, which explained how many of the statements in the op-ed were misleading or inaccurate. USA Today got so much media peer pressure that today it actually published its own analysis, in partnership with FactCheck.org, which came to similar conclusions to the Washington Post article. According to Ad ...Read more

I'm always impressed with the comments I get from so many of you about the most difficult questions the Media Bias Chart brings to mind. These include questions like"what constitutes the left-to right spectrum?" and "how can we really evaluate sources, in a consistent, data-driven, meaningful way?" Maxwell Stearns, Professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, has written extensively on the subject of dimensionality and related topics that make his analysis of these questions especially valuable. For some weekend reading that is especially enjoyable to News Nerds like me, check out his post! https://www.blindspotblog.us/single-post/2018/09/13/The-Newest-Viral-Media-Graphic?message_id=c42de05d-1830-4420-9e21-9125e849f382